Myofascia in a Movement Context

Appreciating the role of fascia in walking leads us to a new understanding of muscles. The old idea of movement via concentric, eccentric, and occasional isometric contraction is simply not how the body works in many functions. The muscles work as a stiffness-adjusting system. Just as a Pilates instructor changes the springs on a reformer to suit the client or the exercise, so too does the neuromyofascial system adjust the springs to match the forces in the tissue, a constant computational task and one that we still fail to fully understand.

The body needs something to hold it together; it is a bag of bones that, because of their slippery ends, require additional support from the surrounding tissue. The joints—the interfaces between the bones—fold, bend, flex, rotate, or extend in predictable directions. They are therefore able to guide the forces in the body: when the quadriceps contracts, the force is transmitted via the patella to extend the knee. However, when we look at the interaction between the body and the ground, the relationship is reversed: it is the bending of the knee on impact that sends the force to the quadriceps, sparking its contraction.

This reversal of function is important. When we look at movements involving some form of impact with a surface, it is the channeling effect of the joint that creates the movement, not the muscle. The joints are like dry riverbeds that direct the water through the landscape via the path of least resistance. Any movement that creates a normal impact on the body, such as the heel strike in walking, will require the deceleration of momentum (and I will outline the many ways the body does this throughout Born to Walk by tracing the action across the major joints involved in walking).

Using the conventional eccentric/concentric contractions of muscles for each step would require a large amount of resources. The body would have to constantly bind and unbind the actin and myosin filaments of the muscles. We often feel the effects of this muscular type of movement when we go for strolls involving a lot of stopping and starting, such as meandering around a museum or shopping with loved ones on a Saturday afternoon. The constant stopping and starting requires more muscular effort and is therefore much more tiring than going for a long, evenly paced walk, which allows other, more efficient, mechanisms to come into play.

In the repetitive motions of walking, the inner tuning of our springs is unconscious. Apparently even the spinal cord is rarely involved in controlling the movement— it is the local relationship between the mechanoreceptors in the fascial tissue and the surrounding “adjusters” of the muscles that are in charge (explored further in the book on p. 163, ‘Mechanoreceptors – the internal monitors’). By finding the most efficient level of stiffness, the body can maximize the use of elastic recoil and minimize the metabolic costs.

Minimizing metabolic cost has apparently driven the adaptation of our upright shape. That shape only makes sense in the context of how it works as a whole during full body movement. It is the interaction between forces and our full anatomy that allows efficiency. To improve quality of movement for our clients we need to see how that system communicates – our job as therapists, is to find the quiet areas that inhibit or interfere with the flow. Optimize those ‘essential events’ and the client’s movement can start to flow.

Taken from, Born to Walk: Myofascial Efficiency and the Body in Movement, Second Edition, ISBN 978-1-913088-10-1, Lotus Publishing, Chichester

Available at https://terrarosa.com.au/product/books/fascia-myofascial-release-books/born-to-walk-myofascial-efficiency-and-the-body-in-movement/